Some Other Kind of Music: The Subversive Power of Magic Realism in "Reservation Blues" and "Tropic of Orange"

April 3^rd, 2020

In their respective novels, Sherman Alexie and Karen Tei Yamashita operate in the language and imagery of the absurd: magical realism. In the words of H. H. Arnason, such authors “create mystery and the marvelous through juxtapositions that are disturbing even when it is difficult to see why … [they] are interested in translating everyday experience into strangeness” (Wechsler 293). Inherent in this definition is the contrast between imagination and reality, and the conflict in drawing clear lines between the two—the underlying suggestion being that fantastical narratives may be more ‘true’ than the real ones. This ambiguity extends even to the definition itself, as the genre is said to contain elements of fable, myth, allegory, satire, and fantasy among others. As Luis Leal says: “If you can explain it, then it's not magical realism” (Leal 127). In this essay, I argue that the ambiguities of magical realism are precisely why Reservation Blues and Tropic of Orange are written to include them, as they help the authors to illustrate the ambiguities delineating culture, race, and borders among minority groups in a postcolonial world of Anglo-American dominance. This essay will demonstrate how both novels fit the uneasy mold of magic realism; how Alexie uses music as magic to counter the dominant narrative of the Spokane in the context of westward expansion; and how Yamashita likewise employs music through the character of Manzanar to dissolve illusions of cultural and geopolitical borders in a globalized future world.

To begin, it is important to establish a clearer definition of magic realism, especially in the context of postcolonial literature. As Wechsler suggests, the genre—if it can even be defined as a single genre—is concerned with “translating everyday experience into strangeness” (Wechsler 293). By this he does not mean that the fantastic is perceived as novel in contrast to the ordinary world, but rather that it is made ordinary—the “strangeness” inherent in magic is made mundane. This has the effect of confusing the reader, creating a dissonance between what is real and what is imagined. “Vagueness and confusion,” Wechsler writes, are “qualities fundamental to the effects of this art on the viewer,” and as such “hardly encourage universal definition” (293). This suggests that ambiguity is the substance of magic realism, both on a textual and metatextual level, as those very same elements which characterise the genre and evoke its intended effect of “vagueness” are precisely what makes the genre so hard to define. This is particularly relevant to minority writing in the common era, as the effort to colonise the Americas was largely one of defining borders—drawing maps, marking differences between cultures, and crafting narratives to justify these processes. By writing about the legacy of colonisation through the lens of magic realism, authors are able to introduce ambiguity to the postcolonial discourse, thereby creating—in the words of James Cox—“new narratives of self-representation that … radically revise and subvert the dominant culture’s conquest narratives and the mass-produced misrepresentations of Native Americans” (Belcher 29). While the Native American context applies mainly to Reservation Blues, both Alexie and Yamashita use vagueness as tool to disrupt conventional ways of thinking about their respective subjects.

Reservation Blues fits the mould of the magic realism most obviously in the first sense of the term: the transmutation of the extraordinary into the ordinary. This is seen primarily through the magical guitar acquired by famous blues performer Robert Johnson through a deal with the devil: a reality which is accepted unquestioningly by Thomas Builds-the-Fire, despite the fact that Robert Johnson should be dead, and that guitars do not ordinarily speak. “‘Thomas,’ the guitar said. It sounded almost like Robert Johnson, but resonated with a deeper tone, some other kind of music. Thomas wasn’t surprised that the guitar sounded almost like Robert Johnson” (Alexie 22). In this scene, Thomas expresses no sense of surprise, as would be expected in a purely realist text; the only way he seeks to define the guitar is in terms of its voice. This creates a dissonance in the mind of the reader which only intensifies as the story goes on: a dentist character expresses no surprise at fillings shaken out by the guitar (34); Johnson claims that the guitar magically returns despite being “buried … [thrown] in rivers, dropped … off tall buildings” (173). This behaviour is not considered unusual, but merely a nuisance. This is classic magical realism, blurring the boundaries between the fantastic and the real, thus creating a dissonance and uncertainty which allows the insertion of alternative narratives. In one such example, Alexie states that “Lightning fell on the reservation right then, and a small fire started down near the Midnight Uranium Mine. Coyote stole Junior's water truck and hid it in the abandoned dance hall at the powwow grounds … [it] was too big for the doors so nobody was sure how that truck fit in there” (45). Here we see the magical once again turned into a mundane nuisance, but the perpetrator is the trickster ‘Coyote’ of Spokane myth made into a living force, manipulating American products (trucks, dance halls) to disrupt their extraction of resources from native lands (the uranium mine). By using the tenants of magical realism, Alexie is able to construct a new narrative which asserts the power of Native belief over Western commodification.

In Tropic of Orange, Yamashita likewise expresses the fantastical through the language of the mundane. The most obvious example of this is the character of Arcangel, whose movement through the story (both literal and figurative) pulls the Tropic of Cancer upward, disrupting the traditional boundaries separating the United States and Mexico. However, a secondary expression of magical realism occurs in the character of Manzanar, who likewise translates the ordinary world into the fantastical by conducting the cars on the Los Angeles freeway: “The freeway was … nothing less than the greatest orchestra on Earth” (35). This is not a symbolic gesture, but an actual expression of the character’s will; like the guitar, Manzanar expresses a magical force in the story, yet it is treated again not as miraculous, but as a mundane inconvenience. This absurdity is expressed as well in the attempts to deal with his disruption, as Yamashita writes: “It was suggested that he could be taken by helicopter and left on a mountain top” (34), a clearly ridiculous proposition in the same manner as Robert Johnson’s attempts to rid himself of his magical guitar, suggesting that the two textual objects (the guitar and Manzanar’s conducting) operate in a similar manner, to create ambiguity and thereby create space to craft new narratives. This is seen in Yamashita’s text, as she sets up a clear contrast between the harmonious actions of the conducting, which “united families, created a community … an entire civilization of sound,” and the landscape of Los Angeles, which is defined on the same page in terms of Western consumer culture: “… summer jobs, a job at McDonald’s, a job at Disneyland. All the TVs in L.A. were turned on … to cartoons—Warner Brothers, Disney, Hanna-Barbera” (33). This disrupts the dominant cultural narratives about what is desirable in life, as the magic music of Manzanar is described as working within the same tangible realm as television and corporations, with far more desirable results. This is not purely to assert the value of his own culture however, as Manzanar is also said to resist the cultural clichés of his Japanese heritage, with Yamashita writing that “He could not confine his musical talents to the silky flow of koi in a pond, the constant tap of bamboo on rock, or manicured bonsai” (34). Just as the magic music in Reservation Blues is both an assertion of and conscious refutation of traditional Native representation, so too is the music of Tropic of Orange a refutation against numerous cultural narratives in favour of ambiguity.

Reservation Blues takes this idea even further by using magic realism to confuse the traditional narratives of Western dominance and cultural production in contrast to the supposedly static and primitive Spokane. This is seen primarily in Alexie’s depiction of Big Mom: a supernaturally long-lived Spokane woman who is said to be responsible for the major figures of twentieth century music through her teaching: “Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and many other names” (10) who in her words invented “stuff I never would have thought of, like jazz and rap” (216). Through the magic realist figure of Big Mom, Alexie imagines a world in which United States cultural production is not something forced upon Native peoples, which they must reject in order to maintain an artificial, dignified image of indigeneity (an image many others in the Spokane tribe want Coyote Springs to conform to). Instead, Alexie locates Native American influence in American music, thereby blurring the borders which delineate the two as culturally and racially separate from one another. This is especially interesting to consider in the context of westward expansion—a great source of trauma for the Spokane—as Alexie continuously associates native modes of expression with an equal and opposite movement. He writes: “Music rose above the reservation, made its way into the clouds, and rained down. The reservation arched it back, opened its mouth, and drank deep because the music tasted so familiar. Thomas felt the movement, the shudder that passed through tree and stone, asphalt and aluminum” (24). In this example, the Western-influenced music of Coyote Springs assumes form and movement, being taken in by an anthropomorphised reservation as something worthy of consumption: however, in that “movement” Thomas recognizes the path of the music as falling through trees and stones in addition to asphalt and aluminum—two distinctly Western materials. Like Big Mom’s teaching of famous musicians, this likewise suggests that Western culture must travel through indigeneity (the “trees and rocks,” drawing on Native associations with nature) to achieve its full expression. This comes to a head towards the end of the novel, when Robert Johnson—a man beholden to his guitar, a distinctly Western instrument—is instead given a cedar harmonica hand-carved by Big Mom, implied to be magical in the same way she is, as he feels “a movement inside the wood, something familiar” (279). Given the use of musical “movement” through trees in the previous passage, this movement inside of musical wood could likewise suggest a reassertion of Native culture within the cultural productions of the West. It is “familiar” because it is that same music which Johnson was first inspired by, located in Big Mom’s teachings. It is music which creates a Spokane movement in contrast to the American movement West. By filtering music through magical realism, Alexie is thus able to disrupt narratives of Western dominance and expansion, blurring the lines (geographical as well as abstract) between cultures.

This same idea of music rendering cultural and geopolitical borders ambiguous is seen in Tropic of Orange as well, as Manzanar’s music likewise evokes ideas of movement and physicality. While conducting his music, Yamashita writes that Manzanar cries at its beauty, letting his musically conjured tears “run down his face and onto the pavement,” while at the same time feeling the “vibration” of the music “rumbling through the cement and steel” (32). While he is Japanese, and his music subtly influenced by his own culture, the previously established ambiguity of that influence is seen in that it passes through the American landscape: like the music of Coyote Springs, it comes up against and travels through Western materials: pavement, cement, and steel. This is effectively an acknowledgement of his music being neither Western nor Japanese, but an ambiguous melding of the two, as the essence of himself and his musical production pass through the dominant culture; indeed, as he constructs his music from the movement of cars on the freeway, it could be argued that his music is a direct acknowledgement of that complexity of influence. This idea is complemented by Yamashita’s suggestion that through his conducting Manzanar can see the “maps … maps … maps” of the freeway, and that this recognition of geographical borders is tied intrinsically to music, as they are “one and the same … each of the maps was a layer of music” (52). For Yamashita, the ambiguity of magic realism—expressed through the literal power of Manzanar’s conducting—is a way of disputing the clear boundaries separating American culture and borders as distinct from outside influence.

Ultimately, the fantastical elements of Reservation Blues and Tropic of Orange clearly operate within the realm of magic realism, as they create ambiguity—both in their symbolic use throughout the text, and in their very nature as magical realist objects, acknowledged but rendered mundane. The dissonance produced by music that is at once Native and Western, Japanese and American, and real and figurative effectively creates a framework of ambiguity, enabling both Alexie and Yamashita to decenter the narratives constructing different cultures, as well as the borders between them.

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues. New York: Grove Press, 1995. Print.

Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature.” Magical Realism: Theory,

History, Community, Duke University Press, 1967, pp, 119–123.

Richardson, Janine. “Magic and Memory in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues.” Studies in

American Indian Literatures, vol. 9, no. 4, 1997, pp. 39–51. JSTOR,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20739424

Wechsler, Jeffrey. “Magic Realism: Defining the Indefinite.” Art Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, 1985,

pp. 293–298. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/776800

Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997. Print.